What is it, Baldwin? Tybalt sent.

  Master, I think whatever Hieron said might have had unintended consequences, Baldwin replied. Volusia was leading the group in prayer, he stopped mid-sentence, and there was a bright light that even I could see through the sand. Then I heard a bunch of people talking about the War God blessing them. I think maybe those gods you pissed off were looking for some excuse to intervene. I’d start praying to your patron. I have a bad feeling we’re going to need the help.

  Tybalt set his jaw and shook his head slightly.

  No, he replied. No, I don’t think I should.

  What?! Baldwin asked. Why?

  Something Lord Mudo’s angel told me before we parted ways, Tybalt sent. About how when one side in this divine conflict takes action, any escalation gets a response from the other side. This might just be the War God’s response to me… existing. If it is, and if there’s a decent chance we can handle it on our own, I don’t want to ask the God of Death for help right now. Any direct interference could make the other side put their thumbs on the scales harder.

  If you say so, Baldwin sent doubtfully.

  All right, it’s time for me to get proactive again, Tybalt sent. He began preparing to leave the cave. First, he removed his folded gambeson from behind himself. Then he carefully folded it one additional time.

  What do you mean, master? Baldwin asked.

  I’m pretty sure Mariella killed a bunch of beastfolk earlier, defending me, Tybalt sent. Now that she’s asleep, I’m going to find the bodies and prepare some more undead for the fight that’s coming.

  Baldwin seemed to hear only a few words of what Tybalt had said from his response.

  The Lieutenant’s asleep? the revenant asked after a brief pause.

  Yes, Baldwin, Tybalt replied. Asleep. In my lap. Fuck off about killing her for right now. I’m not killing her tonight. She saved my life today. More than once, I think. She’s… becoming loyal to me personally. I think there’s something in her that looks for a person to follow and listen to, an authority to believe in. Now she’s picked me. She hasn’t been giving any orders out here, just letting me plan everything and doing whatever I say. This isn’t just a romantic or sexual thing. It’s deeper than that. I think she’s getting attached to me across multiple facets of her identity. My plan is working, so just—

  I’ll say no more about it, master, Baldwin sent, interrupting. Just, ask yourself: if she knew your secrets, the things Hieron and I know, would she have saved you? Would she be looking to you as a leader or whatever? Or would she be afraid of you? I won’t mention it again, unless you ask.

  Fuck off, Baldwin, Tybalt thought.

  But all he sent telepathically was, I’ll talk to you later.

  I’ll alert you when the squad sets out, Baldwin replied.

  As he communicated, the necromancer had slipped the gambeson onto the ground beside his knees. Once he was done talking to Baldwin, he slowly shifted Mariella’s head from his lap onto the gambeson, giving her a new pillow. She twitched in her sleep at the sudden motion, lifted her arms slightly, reached backward, and tried to grab at where he had been. Tybalt had to dodge around her hands, aware that with her strength, this situation could turn into the equivalent of a child clutching a doll to sleep with. If she got a good grip around him, it would be impossible for him to leave the cave without waking her up.

  Fortunately, he was quick enough to evade her blind moves, and she quickly settled back into her previous position, laying on her back and breathing calmly.

  He pulled on his boots—Mariella had tied the shoes together for ease of transportation sometime earlier, so he had to untie them and tie them up again individually—and walked to the entrance of the cave. The necromancer took a long look around outside just to make certain there was no one waiting to ambush him or looking for the two mages. Then he began climbing down the cliff face.

  He was bare chested, and the chill breeze raised goosebumps all over his pale skin, but he tried not to let the cold bother him. He would take a new shirt off one of the corpses if they weren’t too badly ruined by fire and blood. If not, he would get a new outfit when he killed the men Volusia had dispatched to find him and Mariella.

  He reached the ground, tried to tell himself that he wasn’t shivering as he set his feet down in the sand, and quickly found Mariella’s footprints. They stood out far more than usual, since she had been carrying Tybalt on her back.

  He followed her tracks back to where the fight had taken place. It only took a few minutes of walking before he came upon the first corpse. It was a fox beastfolk with light burns all over his body and a single blackened hole through his chest where his heart had been.

  Mariella… wow. What he had thought about her precision before, she had demonstrated she could replicate even in the heat of battle, while outnumbered.

  The foxman’s clothes were only slightly damaged—barely burned aside from the very conspicuous hole where his heart had been, with little trace of blood on the fabric—so Tybalt stripped off his cloak and shirt and took them for himself.

  That’s better, he thought as he put on both clothing items. Nice and warm.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  He chuckled a little as he noticed that the cloak had a comically oversized hood. It was probably necessary to mostly fit the foxman’s big, floppy ears, but it would hide half of Tybalt’s face in shadow. He still kept the hood raised. At least it didn’t noticeably obstruct Tybalt’s vision. It protected his ears quite nicely too.

  With the problem of the cold sorted out for the moment—though beastfolk clothing was flimsy and of poor quality compared with the Army’s gear—Tybalt reached down and touched the corpse with his power.

  Generate Undead.

  Within a few seconds, the dead foxman twitched to unlife. He let out a low growl that Tybalt didn’t bother to quiet. There was no one nearby to hear it, after all. Even Mariella, who was his only concern at the moment, was too far away.

  Tybalt could sense from the mild mana drain and no alert about a new creation that this was merely another zombie, rather than something more exotic and special. That was just fine. Dumb muscle would serve his purposes for the moment.

  “I am your master,” he said. “Follow and obey me. Protect me from any attack unless I order you to do otherwise. Our first task is to find additional corpses that I can turn into your fellows. Take the lead in searching.” He pointed forward, and the zombie rushed off to look for more bodies.

  Over the next ten minutes, Tybalt and the creature located three more cadavers, two fox beastmen and one ibex beastman. He also found his bow and arrows, which he had left on the ground before he moved to the pool to bathe.

  Then he found the last one.

  The foxman lay face down in the water where Tybalt and Mariella had bathed. The necromancer was honestly surprised that any enemy had gotten close enough to land in the pool when he died.

  That will tarnish our recollections of what was otherwise a pretty phenomenal day, he thought. He and Mariella had gotten much closer in a single afternoon, had made more progress in getting to know each other than had accumulated over the last couple of months.

  Now this dead foxman’s body lay right in the middle of that memory, slowly drifting across the surface of the water with the breeze.

  At least he hadn’t been there long enough to begin rotting.

  Tybalt used the handle of his spear to pull the dead man to the shore nearest to himself. He raised the floating fox as he had done with the other beastfolk, all but one that had fallen badly and smashed his head completely on a large rock.

  The floating foxman and all the others but the defective one became zombies.

  Aside from the particularly broken beastman, Tybalt found himself satisfied with his haul. He had never imagined that he was going to keep getting lucky and creating intelligent undead over and over, so there was no disappointment in getting zombies. He knew they would serve his purposes. As long as Tybalt was there to control them, he was confident that his monsters would be effective enough in combat.

  Four new zombies would hopefully be enough to counter at least one or two members of the squad. He already had three other beastfolk zombies on his little team, along with eight skeletons in varying conditions. The surviving undead were carrying the bones of the skeletons that had been broken apart before, and Tybalt was optimistic that he could fix those three in time.

  Then he would have a total of fifteen fighters available to him, plus whatever he could make of the men Volusia had sent to follow him. This didn’t count Baldwin, Hieron, or the four bodies Baldwin had hidden with him, since Tybalt doubted any of those assets could be made available before possible confrontation with the squad.

  What to do with you… he thought, looking down at the headless corpse.

  A couple of days ago, he would have simply left it where it was as a lost cause. Now that Mariella had helped him understand how flexible his powers could be—and how the system was effectively something to manipulate, a limiter to try to get around or a structure to twist into serving a mage’s own purposes—he couldn’t help but feel that there was an opportunity here. Some of the experiments he had intended to perform on the bodies of those he would fight later could be performed on this otherwise useless corpse.

  “Waste not, want not,” he muttered.

  The first thing he would do was see if he could reanimate parts of a body. He had no reason to believe it was possible, but he no longer felt that he had any reason to assume it was impossible either. The sections of Unholy Forces that he had read had omitted much of how magic worked, especially if Mariella’s lore was correct.

  Tybalt drew the dead man’s dagger and used it to hack through one of the beastman’s arms.

  Generate Undead.

  A small chunk of mana flowed from Tybalt’s body into the severed arm. It twitched a single time and then stilled.

  That’s not nothing, though, he thought. I’m on the right track. If a brain is required for bodily activity, my skeletons shouldn’t work. If just a skull is required, what’s so special about a skull? Ultimately, these are just arbitrary rules grounded in the system and my understanding of how the human body works. These aren’t living human bodies that I’m working with, though. Not really. They’re puppets made of meat and bone, nothing more. So there’s no reason I can’t get this arm to move more than a twitch.

  Tybalt pushed a little more mana into the limb, and the hand suddenly clenched into a fist, then released and stopped moving once again.

  Maybe I need some specific intent to make this work.

  As he had that thought, one of his skeletons nudged him telepathically.

  Tybalt responded to the signal by ordering the skeleton to show him what it was looking at. A moment later, he found himself seeing through the creature’s eyes.

  There were eight men walking through the valley directly below the skeleton. The group was led by Private Graven.

  Commander, you’re far too good to me, Tybalt thought. Now that these men had entered his interception zone, he could continue experimenting, with living subjects this time.

  He looked down at the body.

  To be continued… No time for more experiments here, but now I need a weapon. Preferably something made of bone. My wood and metal spear doesn’t make proper use of my powers.

  He reached into the gory place where the head was missing, tried to get around the dried blood, and finally touched the spinal column. It was hard and knobby, as bone typically was.

  If I can pull this thing out, it might make a good sword.

  First, he tried using Scrimshaw on it. His power flowed into the bone, but when he tried pulling on the spinal cord, it started coming out of the body in chunks in his hands.

  Then he tried cutting the back of the fox man’s body with the dagger he had used to cut the arm off, but Tybalt could see, as soon as he partially exposed the bone with the blade, he was also inadvertently damaging the spinal column itself, cutting away the delicate, small pieces that would be part of the blade’s edge.

  Finally, he tried to do what he had been doing when he sparred with Mariella earlier, running his mana through the bone with the intention of making it stronger, harder, sharper.

  He pulled it up and backward, and it began to cut through the flesh.

  A couple of minutes of this activity, and he had the entire bone out.

  It’s shorter than I imagined.

  It would be more like a dirk than a proper sword, but he would make do.